Product Camp Austin 6 app by GetCS

Cesar DOnofrio

Cesar is the CEO and Co-founder of Making Sense. He has been applying his combined leadership and hands-on experience in software development, usability and UI/UX for more than 20 years. Furthermore, he considers himself as a results-oriented communicator.

Let me start from the beginning. You may wonder what Product Camp Austin is. The best word to describe it is “unconference:” it allows attendees to vote democratically on the sessions they find intriguing. The sessions are presented by peer volunteers, entry is open to anyone interested in the idea, and it’s free.

The objectives of PCA are:

Teach

Learn

Network

Product Camp 6 Diary

On Saturday, the day started very early for us. Before the clock even turned 7 a.m., we left San Antonio with Juan De Abreuand began our trip to Austin. It was a rainy day, so we drove cautiously. When we arrived at 8, we had a comforting cup of coffee and people started to show up around 8.30. After registration and voting, the attendees headed to the welcome session. Tom Evans, other volunteers and I manually counted the votes and uploaded the selected sessions on the PCA schedule tool that we built (link). I really prefer voting online using the the app ;)

Before the sessions, Tom and I showed all the attendees how to use the app. The tool had all the sessions’ details (time, room, title, description, category, etc.), and the attendees could check the information on each session and add it to their schedule. This was a great improvement since the last app we created, as attendees could register the sessions that most interested them. I hope the attendees enjoyed the app and found it useful. We also got great good feedback through Twitter.

I’d like to congratulate the PCA organizers–thanks to their teamwork, we were able to create an efficient and user-friendly sessions app.

We were glad to sponsor Product Camp Austin 6 and were really happy with the outcome of the sessions app. We had a lot of fun building this new and improved version with Tom Evans, Amanda Wingard-Phillips, Leandro Gonzalez, Diego Noya and Nancy Medica. The PCA schedule app was produced after hours and between work for clients, and we put a lot of effort and hard work into it. Also, all my gratitude to Mark Suchanek who allows us to be Product Camp Austin sponsors!

It may not look like it, but we spent a good amount of time rebuilding the app using Windows Azure. With this new version, the tool is more scalable and reliable. With Windows Azure, we as developers don’t need to worry about load balance, D&R, backup, networking, servers, OS, etc. The Azure platform resolves all those problems for us and we just focus on adding value for our business users.

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Nancy Medica

Nancy is HR Recruiter at Making Sense and Argentina’s Software Chamber representative of the US ArgenTIna IT network. She considers herself as a communication and social media lover. Keep in touch with her on LinkedIn!